STAFF MOTIVATION

Strategies for Improving Staff Motivation

Evans Wekesa
 Managers’ requirements
 In alignment (to be on the team)

 Thinking out of the box (be creative)

 Empowering employees

 Maintaining core competencies

 Managing change

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 Employees’ requirements
 Flexibility - accept change readily

 Clock speed - move faster, think faster

 Accept ambiguity & uncertainty

 Stay current - commit to life-long learning

 Contribute - add more value than you take

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 Requirements for today’s employees
 Manage yourself – be a fixer not finger pointer

 Don’t get a job, make a job

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 How can an organization motivate its employees?

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 Strategies for improving motivation
 Implement effective performance evaluation systems

 Implement individual rewards & recognition systems

 Improve work design and job design

 Promote employee involvement

 Solicit employee feedback systematically

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 Work design techniques for improving productivity
 Streamline work processes

 Adopt team (group) concepts

 Deploy Quality of Work Life (QWL) practices

 Implement group reward & recognition systems

 Design effective layouts and work cells

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 Job design techniques for improving productivity
 Job simplification

 Job rotation

 Job enlargement

 Job enrichment

 Job sharing

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 Teams and productivity
 Content (goals and outcomes) and process (how
the team accomplishes tasks)
Productive teams pay attention to both.

 Cohesion
The team must be cohesive but must not want
agreement more than accuracy (or quality of
outcome).
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 Undercurrents in team dynamics
 Personal identity in the group
 Membership, inclusion
 Influence, control, mutual trust
 Getting along, mutual loyalty

 Identity with the work unit

 Effects on relationships with co-workers and loyalty to
work unit

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 Undercurrents in team dynamics (cont’d)
 Relationships between team members

 Effects on rank and positions

 Friendship and formality

 Openness

 Personality preferences

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 Employee involvement
 Employee involvement means allowing employees to
participate in work-related decisions and improvement
activities that affect them.

 This doesn’t mean anarchy, but it means that

management shares its responsibilities in decision-
making with employees.

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 Benefits of employee involvement
 Increases trust and commitment.

 Improves employee communications and attitudes

 Involved employees are more likely to generate

new ideas and achieve a higher quality of work
life

 Reduce the workload of managers

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 Levels of employee involvement
 Information sharing
 Dialogue
 Individual problem solving
 Intra-group problem solving
 Inter-group problem solving
 Focused problem solving
 Limited self-direction
 Total self-direction

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 Approaches to involving employees
 Commitment from management
 Must be long-term, ongoing attempts
 Communications efforts
 feedback
 “bottom-up” communications
 employee surveys and suggestion systems
 Training and education

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 Characteristics of an effective recognition system

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 Characteristics of an effective recognition system
 Meaningful and fair
 Fun and non-threatening
 Publicize extensively
 Input from employees on the system
 Tied to performance evaluation system
 Allow nomination from employees and customers

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 Satisfied employees are more productive and
more committed
• Job Satisfaction:
Degree of enjoyment employees derive from doing their
jobs

• High Morale:
An overall positive employee attitude toward the
workplace

• Low Turnover:
A low percentage of employees leave each year

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THANK YOU